Sadly that was the case for me about a month ago, the X5670 running on Gigabyte X58-Extreme at 4.2Ghz + 24GB of RAM was still plenty fast for my needs but the platform was holding it back, specifically in the following ways (mostly related to PCIe):
It was sad removing and letting the old kit go, I've literally had that motherboard since 2011 and Gigabyte support has been superb.
- Lack of PCI-e 3.0 and NVME support, I've researched lots of thread on how to get NVME working but suddenly noticed our lanes are only PCI-e 2.0 and suddenly realized wow is this really that old?
- Lack of SATA 6gbps, because of this, I had been running a SAS2.0 RAID card to power my SSDs, this took up yet another precious PCI-e slot
- Lack of USB3.0, was able to take advantage of that PCI-e 1x slot with an adapter but yea
I am glad to say my new kit is still staying in the lineage - Asus X99 + Xeon E5-2678 v3 + 64GB ECC RAM, while can't truly overclock this I am running the turbo lock mod. Good times![]()
Well I can't saturate the PCI-e 2.0 bus no matter what I do and I have an LSI PCI-e 8x raid card flashed to IT mode for SATA3 as well as a NVME to PCI-e 8x adapter. Perhaps it's my ageing NVME SSD, but performance is still far better than any SATA3 SSD and I never want for any more power.
Yeah, USB 3.0 would be nice. But TBH, it's not something I in any way lust over - I'm not going to upgrade just for USB 3.0. I'm certainly not counting my use of PCI-e slots. The X99 platform is nice, but it's still demanding a high price as a result.